Gadgetory

well it seems like everybody wants a big phone even if a lot of us act like we don't having the bigger screen and the bigger battery gets addictive fast no matter how hard it is crammed in your pocket Samsung phones led the trend then the iPhone jumped in and now Google is here with a gigantic slab of Android you asked for it you got it this is the Nexus 6 it's gotten really cliche to talk about how big phones are but seriously the Nexus 6 just feels massive with a six inch screen technically it's 5.9 six inches it's bigger than the Galaxy Note 4 it's bigger than the iPhone 6 plus it's just plain huge the thing about using a huge phone is at first it's weird but then it's great and eventually everything else just feels too small you can't really use it with just one hand but because of its curved sloped back it Nestle's nicely in your hands it's thicker at the top than at the bottom which can make it feel a little unbalanced sometimes the power button and the volume buttons are smack in the middle of the right-hand side which is fine but it does make it a little weird in landscape it has the same metal rim around the edges as a Motorola MOTO X which gives it a solidity and probably contributes a bit to the heft it weighs just a half an ounce more than the iPhone 6 plus the back is a hard plastic and either white or midnight blue and it has a sort of eggshell feel that I actually kind of like it really is just like a blown-up Moto X and that's pretty great but it's a more powerful phone than the Moto X it has a quad HD display a faster more powerful processor more RAM a bigger battery and a second speaker on the front basically it's top of the line specs for Android and more importantly all that powers put to good use the phone is fast and doubled anything I asked it to do with no problems the only time I ever found it to be slow was when I was wishing the animations in lollipop or tune to move just a little bit faster and then there's the screen you already know it's big and it has an insane pixel density of 493 ppi you absolutely won't see the pixels on this thing but what you will see if you look close enough is some weird textures and colorations here and there basically if you tilt the screen you can see the colors shift a bit and maybe even see some rainbow banding but really that's just a nitpick and it's one of the only knocks I have against his hardware but on a phone that's expensive you'd expect it to be immaculate at any angle there's a big benefit to using an AMOLED screen though it's one of the new features on Android 5.0 lollipop and it's called being displayed right now it only works on the Nexus 6 your notifications show up right on the lockscreen and lollipop and on the Nexus 6 they show up in a subtle black and white only mode right when they come in it doesn't light up the whole screen and it doesn't drain the battery and it's super useful Google Motorola also crammed an extra loudspeaker on the front so you can get true stereo sound front-facing speakers are great and even though this doesn't have quite the audio quality of the HTC One m8 it's still much better than most of the competition there's a 13 megapixel camera with a dual LED flash here and I'm pleased to say it's the best camera I've used on a Nexus device it's just wildly better than the camera on the Nexus 5 but the bitter truth is that cameras on Nexus devices up until now haven't been very good so I'm grading on a pretty serious curve here the shutter speed is fast enough for me in a lot of cases it's basically instantaneous though there's still sometimes an annoying lag especially in low light but thanks to the optical image stabilization you can get some pretty decent low-light shots the truth is that it's still not as good as the iPhone 6 or 6 plus or even as good as Samsung phones at their best I kind of feel like the best way to think about this camera is like golfing every now and then you get that one perfect shot nice saturation and tack sharp focus the kind of shot that makes you think you could get that shot every time and with practice you can be really good with it but sometimes you're just gonna Duff it we've come to expect impressive battery life from these ginormous phones and the new Nexus doesn't disappoint I easily made it through a day and a half of regular use and if you're gentler on it you can probably extend that to two there's a quick charge feature that will give you multiple hours after it's just 15 minutes when it's plugged into the included charger plus lollipop has a new battery saver mode and lollipop really is the star here it's a complete and total redesign for Android based on a new philosophy for how touchscreen software should work it's called material design it's a fuse with bright colors depth and helpful animations that give you clues about what the phone is doing it's just gorgeous and friendly it sort of sits in the middle of a Venn diagram of reserved elegance and andy warhol style pop art which is kind of not a space I would have believed existed but it works more than the design though there are really thoughtful tweaks you'll find all over the OS and there's also a new priority mode that you can tweak so only important stuff will come through and you can set that mode to only last an hour or two so you don't have to worry about forgetting to go back to a normal mode the multitasking button now gives you a basically infinite overview of your some of those apps like Chrome or Gmail can stick multiple cards into that overview stack which makes it easier to deal with complicated tasks you can even set a guest mode if you want to hand your phone over to a friend there's new battery improvements under the hood speed improvements and a bunch more we have a full review of lollipop to cover at all but the bottom line is this is the best improvement to Android in years my biggest complaint about the software is that I wish Google had done more to take advantage of this massive screen Android was the original home for big ass phones and you'd like to think it could be better designed to take advantage of all that space but when you turn the phone sideways only a few apps really give you a noticeably different view there's one more big thing to talk about with the Nexus 6 and that's the price we've all gotten used to Google selling phones for dirt cheap but this one retails it's $650 that's on par with other top-tier phones and like those other phones Google has finally brought the Nexus back to most US carriers so at least you'll be able to buy it with the subsidy if you want the best Android phone you can possibly get right now the Nexus 6 is undoubtedly it but that's assuming your definition of best phone includes really really big we've been watching phones and their screens get larger and larger every year and every year we think okay that's enough that's as big as these get nobody would want anything bigger and every year we're wrong but this year I'm calling it anything bigger than this phone and it's not a phone it's a tablet anything bigger and we'll need a fashion revolution to redesign our pockets and purses to accommodate all our new gadgets the Nexus 6 is the limit and it turns out that the limit is a pretty great place to be you